Don’t forget that women’s rights are a recent invention: Mallick

A celebration of a few exceptional women who courageously fought to make Canada a more just and inclusive country

Women of Canada, would you like to become a riotous subversive artist? Start a union? Win back First Nations rights taken from you because you married off the reserve? Refuse to move to the black-patrons-only section of the movie theatre? Have the vote?

Imagine it’s the 19th and 20th centuries. Good luck to you, my friends, because the odds aren’t good. You face a wall of loathing and contempt for your womanhood, if you were born poor you will stay that way, there are few jobs for you, and the obstacles you face are the size of Titanics, glaciers, monoliths.

Yet women achieved all these things and much more. One hundred years ago, most women won the right to vote in Manitoba, Alberta and Saskatchewan, thanks to Nellie McClung and her stalwarts.

Other provinces followed suit, Quebec finally allowing female suffrage in 1940, how generous. Federally, women were barred along with “idiots, madmen, criminals and judges” until 1917. It wasn’t until 1960 that all Canadian women got the vote.

Canada’s History magazine has celebrated the anniversary by naming 20 heroines and explaining their greatness in an earlier time. I’m grateful to this wonderful magazine for information I knew only vaguely: university education was routinely denied to women until the late 19th century, blatant wage discrimination only became illegal 60 years ago, and medicine and law, forget it.

Fascinated as we are by Doctor Who and time travel, remember that you were out of luck with antibiotics, also womanhood. While the men in frock coats ran everything, you were shunned and, oh, dying in a potato field with a tuber your only friend.

Yet women did things that would rattle the future, as Canada’s History describes.

Take Mary Ann Shadd Cary, a “tactless, outspoken woman who overstepped the bounds of respectable, domestic black womanhood.” Born in Delaware in 1823, she moved to Windsor after an 1850 American law gave slave owners the right to hunt down slaves in free states. Come to Canada, she declared. She founded her own newspaper, the Provincial Freeman, but faced an onslaught of criticism as a female editor.

Born in 1918, Madeleine Parent was scarred by what she saw of the Depression and the rise of fascism. She became a labour leader in Quebec, the Duplessis government convicting her for seditious conspiracy. A retrial acquitted her. She spent her life building unions and defending women’s rights.

Emily Carr, “Canada’s Van Gogh,” was born in 1871 in Victoria, a city lacking a local art school or gallery or library. So she eventually fled to study and paint in Europe, where she had a nervous breakdown. When her Vancouver show was unsuccessful, Carr went silent for 15 years and ran a boarding house. She felt “a dead lump … in my heart where my work had been,” as historian Charlotte Gray describes it. Finally the National Gallery offered her prominence and the Group of Seven welcomed her. But how did she find the courage to break the rules of painting with her wild greens?

Mary Two-Axe Earley was born in 1911 on the Kahnawake Mohawk territory, writes Gray. Her decades-long work helped end a huge injustice: status under the Indian Act would no longer be denied to women who married non-Aboriginals. This rescued 16,000 women and 46,000 first-generation descendants. A woman’s existence was no longer defined by the man she married.

In 1946, Viola Desmond, a black Halifax hairdresser, refused to move into the unofficially segregated section of a rural movie theatre. She was injured while being removed and then jailed. Such segregation ended in 1954, thanks a lot, Nova Scotia.

Bertha Wilson was the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada. She had entered law school despite a dean telling her to “go home and take up crocheting.” And now we have the splendid Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin who stood up to intemperate Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

These women found their courage within, but I can scarcely imagine how.

Canada’s History, edited by Mark Collin Reid and published by Melony Ward, reminds me that history takes two steps forward, one step back. I have written before that Canada needs prominent feminists. But it wasn’t until Prime Minister Justin Trudeau chose a cabinet with gender parity that Canadians began discussing women’s rights with a kind of fervour.

Feminism will not be achieved by women alone. Good men will help us and I am immensely grateful to those who do.